2 posts tagged “facebook generation”
This is a true story.
Moving from La Guardia Airport to my hotel in the Upper West Side of NYC last Wednesday, I glanced through Corbin Ball's e-zine with particular interest on his article "The Speaker-Audience Balance is Shifting" on my Treo. Having just posted a blog on Web 2.0, I was compelled to read more.
"Web 2.0 technology is moving the balance of power from the speaker to the audience," Corbin opens with this understated statement in his article.
Corbin goes on to write about a shocking incident at the March 2008 annual "South by Southwest Conference" held in Austin, TX which involved a live interview with the 23-year old billionaire founder & CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, a BusinessWeek columnist named Sarah Lacey and an increasingly impatient & surly audience during a Keynote Plenary session.
What happened next is every Conference organizer's worst nightmare.
As the session's live interview drug on, attendees "pulled out their cell phones and started twittering. (www.twitter.com) Twittering is a Web 2.0 phone-based networked community (think text-message meets the chat room.) Text comments about how 'lame' the session was started flying in the hall. The audience increasingly became dissastisfied. Someone posted a dare to yell out "Zuck you suck". Someone took up the offer. And the whole session devolved from there. As the social media took over, the crowd started shouting out questions on their own. The session went off the rails from there," Corbin writes. Click here to read the article in entirety. Many of the actual participants were far less staid & polished in their description of the event.
While reading this, I began to envision the Jerry Springer-style mutiny, how with nothing other than cellphones & web access, these attendees revolted. They stormed the stage & took over the microphone both virtually, then literally-- demanding that their unprecedented voice to be heard, like a group within the confines of Lord of the Flies gathering together to overthrow the island & shouting 'Enough! We demand to be heard.' (Read another far less genteel account here in blog on Wired Blog Network.)
While I would have loved to have personally witnessed this revolution, I would lay money that SXSW will approach things differently next year. They'll clearly be more proactive in harnessing the power of Web 2.0 for their future conferences.
In fact, here's what they had to say "Certainly the most-talked about session of this day was the Mark Zuckerberg Keynote interview, as conducted by Sarah Lacey of BusinessWeek. For better or for worse, this interview forcefully demonstrated how new technologies enable formerly disconnected crowds to effectively communicate with each other about their feelings -- in this case, their dislike of the content at hand."
Read the official SXSW comments here.
I share this story with you NOT to scare the daylights out of you. But rather to again say that there IS a new breed of meeting attendee. And their weapons of the day include nothing other than Web 2.0 and a cellphone.
Arm yourself before going out there.
Don't think that your group is techno-saavy enough to use these weapons? Perhaps not today, but someday soon. I promise. Unless perhaps you are like one of the groups that I wrote about in my previous blog, where you don't have the younger Facebook generation engaged in your attendance. And if this is the case with your attendance, then you have far bigger problems than being concerned about having your General Session Stage overrun by mutinious attendees.
Email me by clicking here for some tips on how to navigate through the maze and how to manage Web 2.0 for your organization.
The cover story on the Wall Street Journal this weekend was an intriguing article, "iDo--How the Facebook Generation gets Married." Nearly as compelling to me as a hot Starbucks, I tore into the article on my 6am flight out of San Francisco yesterday morning.
My takeaway? That the 'wikification' of our global world has now penetrated into the very core of wedding planning. Websites like Weddings.com, WeddingTracker.com and WeddingWindow.com are reporting substantial user increase in their online polling options, reporting between 15-20% growth since this time last year. Polling questions run the gamut from "Should I wear my hair up, Down & Straight or Down & Curly?" "What type of wedding cake should we serve?" Click here to read the Wall Street Journal article.
Why my intrigue? After all, I have been married for 18 years & planning for another wedding seems quite distant with my 6-year-old son. My intrigue actually springs directly from my customer's challenges. The majority of my association customers tell me that universally, they are having a more difficult time garnering the attention & participation of the younger generation. The end result of this seemingly insurmountable challenge is that unless the younger members join the older members to become engaged and attend association events, the associations stand to lose relevance and even their future.
Communicating value proposition & relevance to this Facebook Generation is difficult to articulate in a compelling manner as they define it differently than the rest of our generation. This younger generation defines Social Networking through a different medium than what was available to us as we came up. And not only this, but we NEVER would have even thought to poll our Wedding Guests to find out what type of cake they preferred, or how we should wear our hair. So what has changed?
The introduction of Web 2.0 has totally revolutionized how an entire generation does life. They seek Social Proof, they create buzz through Web 2.0 tools in managing the events of their life. "Online polling fills a need for feedback among a narcissistic 20-something generation," says Jean Twenge, an associate Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University in the same Wall Street Journal article.
So why is this relevant to YOU? Both inclusive & exclusive of this Facebook Generation, it is clear that there is a NEW breed of Meeting attendee. And we can learn something from our younger counterparts in how to speak relevantly to this new breed of attendee.
Remember the wedding polling I mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article? Proof, I say that Web 2.0 must be ushered into every association seeking relevancy to it's members. If Brides who are managing a one-time event embrace this new model of communication to execute a flawless event, then how much more should we as professional meeting planners embrace it for our multiple meetings? After all, wedding guests are far more forgiving than exhibitors & meeting attendees, so our margin of error is much more slim. Just because we don't have the same emotion attached to our events doesn't mean that we can't put our heart and soul into our events.
Along these lines, Experient has embarked upon a tireless mission to seek out & find the best offering which offers the ability to embrace Web 2.0 and morph into the language of our members. We set out to find the crossover functionality between Online Communities and Knowledge Repository. We left no stone unturned.
The end result? We have identified the Best-of-Class to lead into the clearing. Click here to email me if you want to learn more about our Best-of-Class discovery. I think you'll be happy to know that you have a guide with a flashlight through the fog of Web 2.0.
